State funds were used to digitize documents and books from 6 collections: Great Falls History Museum newsletters, Conrad Public Library yearbooks, MSU Billings Library graduate catalogues, Museum of the Rockies postcards,  Dillon Public Library newspapers, Chouteau County – Geraldine Branch newspapers. The two newspaper collections have been added to the Montana Newspapers website. The newsletters from the Great Falls History Museum and the yearbooks from Conrad were added to the MMP before the migration began. The Graduate catalogs from MSU Billings and the postcards from Museum of the Rockies will be added to the new platform. 

Including these new, a total of 12 collections and 3,110 items were added to the MMP, bringing the total 184 collections at the end of this reporting period. Some collections were removed from the MMP during the migration process, as some institutions decided not to continue to keep their items in the MMP. Additionally, some smaller collections were combined where logical from a content perspective. The total collections migrated to the new platform was 172.

In 2019, MSL began a Request for Information to determine whether there were viable options to replace the MMP’s current platform, CONTENTdm. After delays and rewrites, a final Request for Proposal was conducted in 2020 and Recollect was selected as the platform for the MMP. Content migration began in April 2021. 

Original high resolution content files had been collected since 2019 and stored in a locally hosted digital archive. Metadata was exported from CONTENTdm and conformed or rewritten for Recollect, and many image files were converted to pdf to conserve space in the new platform. When the new site was launched in June 2021, 22,000 of 75,000 items had been migrated. Staff continue to work on the migration process, and are working to add rights statements to items and collections.

The new Recollect platform allows for multiple new ways for users to interact with content, including tagging, suggested edits, and crowd-sources transcription. These features will be available to users once the migration is complete.

The updates that were made to the Montana Memory Project website during FY17 continued to provide a better user experience, and have been supplemented by an increased use of social media to draw users. Similarly, the migration to a new platform has helped to increase user interest. Since the last reporting period, the number of page views increased 13% to 2,863,258, the number of users increased 86% to 263,255, and the number of sessions increased 61% to 335,900.

The MMP Director shared curated and themed sets of MMP content with the public via social media, averaging a reach of 1,014,296 Facebook users per post. The MMP’s social media following has increased 69% since the last reporting period, with 18,851 Facebook followers and 621 Twitter followers, and 390 Instagram followers from the account created during the prior reporting period. A weekly newsletter is also sent to interested users via GovDelivery.